A very specific disgust

Statue of a crowned postman with rat, on the island of Nuncio, in the Sunless Sea video game. Via Gamepedia.

Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street Monsignor Ross Douthat, on the doctored tape falsely suggesting that the Planned Parenthood organization sells "baby parts" from aborted fetuses; false or not, the Monsignor still thinks it ought to be a "problem" for PP:

...the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood. It’s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience — the reasoning that notes that it’s precisely a fetus’s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one’s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just “products of conception” or tissue for the knife.

Dear Ross,

You certainly are a dick. For my part, I prefer to stay snarky and lighthearted on this page, and people like you aren't really invited, but the smugness of that reference to being "informed by reason and experience", the language of an unluckily stupid young parish priest (I know they're not all stupid!) laying down the law in spite of the fact that he's got only the reason they gave him in seminary and no experience at all, is more than I can bear. Aren't you getting a little long in the tooth to hold on to callow as your main shtik? Years away from the chunky Reese Witherspoons and a father yourself?

My own experience includes a few cases in my youth of worrying about whether a woman friend would need an abortion or not (more often though not always out of simple friendship than personal responsibility) and one "spontaneous abortion", as they're called, in Singapore in the late 1980s, when the Helpmeet and I lost a much-desired baby to some nameless infection (they suggested toxoplasmosis but we had no contact with pets and we never saw a diagnosis) about midway through the second term, a really beautiful tiny boy who I saw for the first time (ultrasounds don't count) dead on a stainless-steel shelf after an early labor.

At some point after we calmed down, maybe a couple of weeks later, I noticed that I had a deep feeling for the first time of what it is abortion opponents are upset about, the beauty and humanity of that little thing consigned to nonexistence, but at the same time reason taught me that they were wrong. What makes your fetus a human being while it's still in utero isn't, as I've written here somewhere before now, its biology, the perfection of its ears and fingernails, wondrous as those are, but its social existence. It becomes a human being when its mother or whoever falls in love with it, starts coming up with names, enjoys being kicked from the inside; or when it's born, whichever comes first. My dead son was a human being because we'd fallen in love with him from the start, but I could imagine, and indeed knew from experience, how a woman could be pregnant and feel nothing but dread, and I could understand why she shouldn't be forced to carry that thing to term. The earlier, obviously, the better.

Many years and two ridiculously healthy kids later (we'd had fertility issues, but they miraculously vanished when we moved to the States), I have no reason to change my mind.

What I wanted to say, though, was this: As we stared at our dead child, so thin and white, a functionary asked us whether we wanted to donate the "remains" to the hospital—it was a teaching hospital and a pretty good one—for research, and we didn't hesitate at all. Of course! Maybe they'd learn something that would protect some future parents from our experience. We weren't queasy about it, nor were we indifferently regarding him as a "product of conception". We thought it right that something, however small, should be made of his life.

The thing is, that's primarily what the Planned Parenthood fetuses are shipped out for. In addition to the implication that the organization is somehow realizing a profit from them, obviously untrue, is the implication that there's something unseemly being done with them, that

an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism

and that is so utterly false! No, it isn't pretty how their little corpses are carved up, it will make you queasy if you're not strong-hearted, but the fact is that there are many more stillbirths than late-term abortions, and sending them to the lab is the very best thing you can do, regardless of your views on the morality of abortion, for all of them, and for all of their parents.

But the sliminess of you, Ross Douthat, jumping in to the story without apparently even looking at the material to find out what's wrong with it, to give the Times imprimatur to the lies being told about the case, and about the great organization of Planned Parenthood which has done so much for the health of women and their wanted babies—that's something I really don't have words for. That is, basically, fuck you.

Sincerely,

David